Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and BeliefPrinceton University Press, 2021 M05 11 - 328 pages Outside the Fold is a radical reexamination of religious conversion. Gauri Viswanathan skillfully argues that conversion is an interpretive act that belongs in the realm of cultural criticism. To that end, this work examines key moments in colonial and postcolonial history to show how conversion questions the limitations of secular ideologies, particularly the discourse of rights central to both the British empire and the British nation-state. Implicit in such questioning is an attempt to construct an alternative epistemological and ethical foundation of national community. Viswanathan grounds her study in an examination of two simultaneous and, she asserts, linked events: the legal emancipation of religious minorities in England and the acculturation of colonial subjects to British rule. The author views these two apparently disparate events as part of a common pattern of national consolidation that produced the English state. She seeks to explain why resistance, in both cases, frequently took the form of religious conversion, especially to "minority" or alternative religions. Confronting the general characterization of conversion as assimilative and annihilating of identity, Viswanathan demonstrates that a willful change of religion can be seen instead as an act of opposition. Outside the Fold concludes that, as a form of cultural crossing, conversion comes to represent a vital release into difference. |
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... question taken up again , this time successfully . In 1845 the Tory government of Sir Robert Peel passed legislation that opened municipal office to Jews . Ironically , the momentum for Jewish emancipation that had begun under liberal ...
... question . Within Ireland the movement for Catholic emancipation served to redress social and economic ills , protest against which had begun to shape Irish peasant nationalism . Because Irish identity was so closely imbricated with the ...
... question of heresy did not arise . What might have been an opinion contrary to accepted doctrinal meanings was declared nonheretical by the Privy Council according to the standards of compatibility . Accentuated by the spirit of ...
... questions of voice , agency , and representation , and because these questions also dominate analysis of the textual presence of converts- -a presence at times so elusive and impalpable as to turn converts into abstractions — a ...
... question of rights is worked out . The crucial point of reference is the state , which performs the dual move of effacing the religiosity of individuals and groups , while at the same time ensuring their rights to such things as ...